It's much more than just "grabbing video outputs"... the whole driver would need a lot of careful planning to be able to have multiple instances work reliably together, and it would require a lot of work to make it an officially supported feature. The fact that it's even allowing you to do it at all sounds like a bug.

It's much more than just "grabbing video outputs"... the whole driver would need a lot of careful planning to be able to have multiple instances work reliably together, and it would require a lot of work to make it an officially supported feature. The fact that it's even allowing you to do it at all sounds like a bug.

Well, that's a bit sad really. Most modern Linux distributions provide a "switch user" option that fires up another X server. This is very useful when a single computer is used by more than one person (I'd say a very common situation).

How are people dealing with this problem? In previous versions of the driver, everything worked fine, but the latest one is crashing two of my computers at home. I'd say not being able to have more than one person use the computer is a negative selling point for nVidia.

What Aaron just says is that NVIDIA doesn't currently officially supports multiseat (NVIDIA GPU driving different video outputs).

Running two X servers which share the same configuration and the same output has been always possible (in fact I'm running such a configuration without any problems - switching between users using Ctrl + Alt + F7/F8 buttons).

I suppose nouveau developers will make multiseat possible (if it's not available already).

What Aaron just says is that NVIDIA doesn't currently officially supports multiseat (NVIDIA GPU driving different video outputs).

Running two X servers which share the same configuration and the same output has been always possible (in fact I'm running such a configuration without any problems - switching between users using Ctrl + Alt + F7/F8 buttons).

I suppose nouveau developers will make multiseat possible (if it's not available already).

Hello,

That's a relief to hear.

However, it brings back my original problem: Exiting any of the X servers while any of the other X servers (or itself) is in the foreground crashes the machine entirely. This was not the case with older versions of the driver. "nvidia-173" (ubuntu parlance) exhibits this problem. This happens with different video cards even. I tried submitting a debug dump, but there seems to be no interest in this. I wonder if I'm the only one with this problem.

What Aaron just says is that NVIDIA doesn't currently officially supports multiseat (NVIDIA GPU driving different video outputs).

To clarify, multiseat on -one card-. I've run multiseat on my workstation before (2+cards) playing all sorts of WINE and Linux games against someone else running on the other seat. It works perfectly. The problem the OP is running into, is that you cannot reasonably divide a card up to do two things at once that are unaware of eachother. This requires very complex driver support, and there are few use cases for such a solution.

If you're looking for massive multiseat, look elsewhere. Matrox makes cards supporting MANY seats and you can get alot of users on one beefy workstation that way.